The Congress For Cultural Freedom’s Ultimate Failure

A new history of the Cold War in Latin America highlights the political impotence of intellectuals.

September 8, 2016

Over halfway through Roberto Bolaño’s
The Savage Detectives, Ulises Lima disappears. The character (modeled on
Bolaño’s close friend, Mario Santiago) fortuitously ends up in a
group of Mexican poets traveling to Nicaragua to show solidarity with the
revolutionary Sandinista government. The trip’s leader worries that the
anarchist Lima will fight with the otherwise Marxist-Leninist delegation, but
between revolutionary tourism and getting drunk no one notices. At the end of
the trip, Lima is nowhere to be found. At some point, he stumbled from the
metaphorical blind alleys of radical politics into literal oblivion. The plane
leaves without him.

Patrick Iber’s Neither Peace nor Freedom explains why a besieged revolutionary government would
bother meeting with a delegation of foreign poets. The Cold War was, among
other things, an intense intellectual and cultural dispute. Around the world,
the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) claimed to represent the cause of
autonomous cultural expression and democratic procedures against the onslaught
of, what Harry Truman called, “the slave world.” The Soviet equivalent,
the World Peace Congress, stood against the world-bestriding (and nuclear-weapon-using) United States. They sought, furtively or openly, to win the
loyalty of artists and writers. Intellectuals, for their part, hoped that by
choosing sides (or artfully negotiating them) they could realize the unique
promise of the intelligentsia as a force in modern politics.

The familiar story of the “cultural
Cold War” is about North America and
Western Europe, and most often about the
Congress for Cultural Freedom’s initiatives to erode Communism’s intellectual
prestige. Its highlights are sponsorship of abstract expressionism and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, social democratic journals, and pirated Russian editions of Doctor Zhivago. Its defenders
stand by what they see as a genuinely pluralist effort to undermine
totalitarianism. Gloria Steinem—who worked with the CIA-backed Independent
Research Service to bring Americans to the Soviet-Sponsored World Youth
Festival—said she was “happy to find some liberals in government
in those days who were far-sighted.” Critics echo Andrew Kopkind’s judgment
that this was “a sham pluralism, and it was utterly corrupting.”

But the CCF operated in 35 countries,
not just the North Atlantic. Iber shifts the focus to Latin America, where the
U.S. and the USSR (and after 1959, Cuba) engaged in extensive cultural work to
claim intellectual prestige. This is not just a matter of giving each region
equal weight, but of showing how different the story looks from one region of
the global south. Latin America has a fair claim to being the birthplace of the
cultural Cold War. And specific characteristics of its society reveal
fundamental tensions in the cultural politics that remained latent in other
parts of the world. Finally, a focus on Latin America paints the cultural Cold
War as a failure on all sides, and an illustration of the political impotence
of intellectuals.

Iber begins in Mexico, where the
post-revolutionary government put cultural workers in an important political
role, most famously sponsoring leftist muralists such as Diego Rivera and David
Alfaro Siqueiros. Then, in the 1930s, President Lázaro Cárdenas made Mexico a
haven for radical émigrés. The most famous, Leon Trotsky, was not only leader
of socialist opposition to the USSR but also the author of Literature and
Revolution and an associate of André Breton. One famous socialist muralist
(Rivera) helped bring Trotsky to Mexico, while another (Siqueiros) personally
tried to assassinate him.

Trotsky succumbed to another assassination
attempt in 1940. His surviving associates weathered World War II, during which
Communists in Mexico and the United States joined up with their governments in
the name of Allied victory. The end of the war, and the onset of the diplomatic
Cold War, brought a startling change of fortune for dissident leftists, some of
whom followed their bitter anti-Stalinism into the arms of the U.S. government.
These “anti-Communist entrepreneurs,” as Iber calls them, responded to the activities of the
Soviet-backed World Peace Congress movement by offering to take up the
franchise of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Latin America.

Iber’s decision to start his chronology early makes it easy to
see things from the point of view of CCF collaborators like Julián Gorkin; a
revolutionary socialist, he escaped the radical fratricide of the Spanish Civil
War only to suffer permanent physical scarring from an assault by Stalinists in
Mexico City, and then became a major CIA collaborator in the Latin American
CCF. Besides showing the reasons for collaboration, the meaning of
collaboration is itself complicated. Consider that Leon Trotsky actively tried
to testify before HUAC, the congressional anti-Communist panel that would come
into its own under McCarthy. But Trotsky planned to use his address to denounce
Stalinism and also to incite the workers of the United States to revolution. In
the event, the committee, far from seducing him, refused him even the ability
to enter the U.S. to testify.

One famous socialist muralist helped bring Trotsky to Mexico, while another personally
tried to assassinate him.

For many writers, especially those on
the anti-Stalinist left, this would lead them to a sympathetic portrayal of the
American side of the cultural cold war. It is a strength of Iber’s book, and a
testament to his political sensibilities, that he refuses to let a narrative
that starts with heroically embattled anti-Stalinists become a vindication of “independent” intellectuals or an apology for their dance with the
American state. He shows how, besides compromising themselves with CIA money,
the exiles fundamentally misunderstood Latin America. With their
European-derived anti-totalitarian focus, they could not adapt to a region
where there was no direct experience of Communist oppression but plenty of
resentment against local reactionaries and their American patrons. In a
particularly galling example, Gorkin read aloud “a generic telegram of support
for cultural freedom” from the U.S.-backed military dictator of Guatemala—and was
shocked when other CCF associates objected.

The fact that the CCF attracted Latin
Americans critical of American foreign policy showed that it was never a total
CIA instrument. A younger generation, eager to blaze a new path away from the
vulgar anti-Communism that would defend dictatorship in Guatemala, helped bring
about what Iber identifies as the Latin American CCF’s
greatest (but ironic) victory. Individuals active in the Cuban Association for
Cultural Freedom, it turns out, played a number of notable supporting roles in
the event that would reshape all of Latin American politics, the Cuban
Revolution. One, Jorge Mañach, was responsible for editing “History
Will Absolve Me,” the courtroom speech that made Castro an acknowledged leader
in the Cuban opposition; another, Mario Llerena, smuggled New York Times
reporter Herbert Matthews into the sierra for the interviews which, according
to Fulgencio Batista, made Castro “a legendary figure.” Even as the U.S. backed Batista until almost the bitter end, CCFers worked to bring him down.

The original humanism of the Cuban
revolution (vague enough that even Castro initially agreed to meet with the
CIA) hardened into a Marxism-Leninism that erased the role the CCF had played.
Iber follows his account of this somewhat familiar declension—authoritarian
Communist government narrowing the range of allowable cultural expression—with
a rival case study, showing how the Communist-derived peace movement morphed
into an independent force for civil liberties in Mexico. The Mexican Pro-Peace
Committee during the early Cold War was a projection of Soviet and Communist
organizations. But in time the globally-focused “peace” movement became the
Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), a specifically Mexican (and politically
autonomous) opposition organ. The MLN mobilized tens of thousands around local
issues and called for free press and independent trade unions—“an idea of
democracy based in civil society institutions independent of the state” that
Cold War liberals loved in Poland and Czechoslovakia. But faced with the
imprisonment of painters for supporting striking workers, and the suppression
of MLN mobilization with threats of murder, the local CCF representative cooperated with the Mexican state and the non-cultural CIA
(if you will) to repress what they called the “Russophilic-Cardenista
conclave.” But some of those active in the MLN would go on to successfully end
the country’s one-party rule by the 1990s.

The name of the MLN—movement for national
liberation—reflected how, after the Cuban revolution, the Latin American
Left shifted from the Soviet “peace” ideal to a new politics of sovereignty and
anti-colonial insurrection. In the light of this new challenge, the CCF stepped
up its game, casting off some of the anachronistic anti-Communist exiles in
favor of more dynamic figures. They replaced their stale publications with Mundo
Nuevo, which Iber singles out as “a diamond in the murk” of the CCF’s Latin
American efforts. Guided by the well-connected Uruguayan editor Emir Rodríguez
Monegal, the new magazinewas an early platform for Gabriel García
Márquez, José Donoso, and Mario Vargas Llosa—the cutting-edge novelists at the
center of the so-called “boom” in Latin American literature.

But just as Mundo seemed to
poised to become the voice of a generation, the secret of the CCF’s CIA backing
slipped out and effectively discredited it. This might have left the field open
to the militantly anti-imperial Cuban cultural front, Casa de las Américas.
But in another turn of ineffectiveness, the worldwide revulsion at the
imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla (along with Cuba’s faltering economy
and Castro’s defense of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) dirtied their
brand as well. For all their stratagems and unwitting successes, Iber
concludes, the three sides had, by the 1970s, come up basically short.

Like any history, Neither Peace nor
Freedom highlights certain elements more than others. Telling the story of
three cultural fronts, each compromised and ineffective, means treating the
U.S., the Soviet Union, and Cuba as rivals for hegemony in the region. At
several points, Iber calls them rival “imperial projects.” From other angles,
it is harder to see the conflict as multipolar. The Soviet Union, as leading
historian John Coatsworth has written, “had no significant strategic or
economic interests in the Western Hemisphere.” Soviet aid for struggling
left-wing governments in Guatemala, Chile, and Nicaragua was modest at best.
Even in Cuba, an exception, the local Communist Party had opposed
revolutionary ambitions.

The intellectual’s ambition to seize control of politics
is a “fantasy,” an evasion of the fact that change comes from more obdurate forces.

The body count, much of it racked up in countries left
out of cultural diplomacy, reflected this imbalance: 300,000 Central Americans
(out of a population of just 30 million) were killed between 1975 and 1991, the
overwhelming majority of them at the hands of U.S.-backed dictatorships. Unlike
the efforts at the center of Iber’s book, this non-cultural front of the Cold
War effectively secured an intended result: the preservation of staggering
inequality.

But this qualification does not contradict
Iber’s central point: The intellectual’s ambition to seize control of politics
is a “fantasy,” an evasion of the fact that change comes from the interaction
of more obdurate forces, such as “social
movements, ideas, electoral politics, and economic growth.” In addition to the
careful archival and analytical work, Iber’s book is an impressive (and rare)
example of an intellectual history that, while taking its subjects and their
ambitions seriously, readily concedes how little they mattered.

Tim Barker is a doctoral student in history at Harvard and an editor at large for Dissent.